These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America many have been abducted others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.īecause of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls. Most of them - whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America - are taken to the United States through Mexico. It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area - mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago - where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive.
The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished. The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms bare, putrid mattresses and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.'' Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. But they weren't prostitutes they were sex slaves. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said.
Cars drove up to the house all day nice cars, all kinds of cars. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing they certainly never asked for help. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner.
The house at 12121/ 2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines.
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